Director of Software Development

We are seeking a Director of Development — a strategic and hands-on technology leader to guide the design, development, and delivery of our next-generation personalized cyber risk assessment and protection platform. This platform serves both enterprise and consumer users, offering scalable, modular cybersecurity features that complement existing enterprise solutions while focusing on the human experience.

This is a pivotal leadership role for someone ready to own technology execution today and grow into a future CTO or VP of Engineering. You'll work closely with the COO and CEO on product and technology strategy while still staying close to the code, mentoring technical leads, and ensuring the engineering organization builds secure, scalable, and innovative products.

Key Responsibilities

Technology Strategy & Architecture

• Define and communicate the platform's technical vision and architecture, ensuring scalability, performance, and security.
• Evaluate and select technologies, frameworks, and integrations to support rapid feature growth (React/TypeScript, , MongoDB, AWS).
• Balance innovation with practical delivery, aligning technology decisions with business goals and product roadmap.
• Stay ahead of emerging trends in cybersecurity, SaaS, and cloud-native development.

Leadership & Team Development

• Lead and mentor a growing development organization, currently including:
• Lead Architect/Senior Manager
• Full-stack developers, DevSecOps engineers, and AI/data engineers (organized into squads)
• QA Lead and supporting QA resources
• Coordinate and cooperate with product manager and UX/UI designer
• Build a high-performing engineering culture that values quality, collaboration, security, and continuous improvement.
• Recruit, coach, and scale the team to meet growth demands, including hiring future technical leads and managers.

Execution & Delivery

• Oversee the end-to-end software development lifecycle (planning, design, coding standards, testing, deployment, monitoring).
• Stay hands-on — review pull requests, guide architecture, and dive deep into code when needed.
• Partner with the Product Manager and COO to ensure feature delivery aligns with business priorities and user needs.
• Support DevOps initiatives for CI/CD pipelines, secure deployments, and reliable infrastructure on AWS.
• Champion quality-first practices, ensuring the QA team is empowered to test thoroughly and early.

Collaboration & Stakeholder Engagement

• Work closely with the COO and CEO to define long-term technology vision and translate business goals into actionable engineering plans.
• Partner with product, sales, and marketing to align technology delivery with go-to-market strategy.
• Communicate technical concepts and trade-offs clearly to non-technical stakeholders, including executives and investors.
• Contribute to technical due diligence for partnerships, integrations, and investor conversations.

Key Goals for the First 6–12 Months

• Mature and Scale the Team: Hire, mentor, and structure a balanced development organization (architecture, DevOps, QA, and engineering squads) to support rapid product growth.
• Build a Culture of Innovation: Establish an engineering culture that encourages experimentation, continuous improvement, and collaboration while maintaining a strong security and quality mindset.
• Harden the Architecture: Review, refine, and strengthen the current platform architecture for scalability, performance, and security as the platform evolves to support enterprise and consumer use cases.
• Accelerate Release Velocity: Implement process and tooling improvements (CI/CD, QA automation, DevSecOps practices) to speed up high-quality, secure feature delivery.
• Partner on Product Roadmap: Work closely with the COO, CEO, and product team to translate business goals into actionable technical plans that can be executed reliably and on schedule.

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in software development, with at least 4+ years leading technical teams in SaaS environments.
• Strong hands-on expertise with JavaScript/TypeScript, React, , MongoDB, and AWS-based cloud architecture.
• Proven ability to define architecture, review code, and guide technical direction while scaling teams.
• Experience managing DevSecOps practices, CI/CD, and secure software delivery.
• Familiarity with agile development, sprint planning, and tools such as Jira and Confluence.
• Demonstrated ability to work closely with executives, product teams, and business stakeholders to align technology with business strategy.
• Strong grasp of cybersecurity principles or prior work in a secure software environment (preferred but not mandatory).

Ideal Attributes

• A builder and leader — equally comfortable setting strategic direction and diving deep into technical details.
• Entrepreneurial mindset with the ability to thrive in a fast-growing, scaling environment.
• Excellent communicator who can influence across technical and non-technical teams.
• Passionate about building human-centric security solutions that simplify complexity.
• Open to stepping into a future CTO or VP of Technology role as the company scales.